Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Team or higher, Knowledge Professional or higher |
| Access | Agent, Admin |
Internal links turn a pile of articles into a knowledge base. The one thing to get right is which tab of the link dialog you use: the Help Center article tab rather than pasting an address, because that is what makes a link open in the language the reader is already in.
Link to another article
- Select the text that should be the link.
- Click Insert/edit link.
- Choose the Help Center article tab and search for the article by title.
- Select it and click Link. Use Clear if you picked the wrong one.
The three tabs do different jobs
| Help Center article | Another article in your knowledge base. Search by title. |
| URL | Anything outside your help centre. |
| Heading | A heading inside the article you are writing, for jumping within a long page. |
The dialog also has a Text on link field and an Open in new tab checkbox.
Why the tab matters in a multilingual help centre
Zendesk recommends the Help Center article tab specifically so the article opens in the language the customer is currently viewing the help centre in. Paste an address with a locale in it instead and a Dutch reader following it lands in English, or the reverse.
The failure mode, too: somebody navigating manually to an article in a language it has not been translated into sees an error, or is sent to the home page for that language.
Describe the destination
Link text should say where it goes. "See setting up your business hours" works; "click here" does not, and it is unusable for anyone with a screen reader scanning a list of links. The Text on link field is where you set that.
Link both ways
An article linked from nowhere is found only by search. When you write something new, add a link to it from the articles a reader would arrive at first. That takes a minute and it is what makes a knowledge base navigable.
Editing and removing
To change where a link points, highlight it and click Insert/edit link. To unlink text without deleting it, open the same dialog and click Remove link at the bottom.
Deleting an article breaks every link to it, and archiving it does the same, and nothing warns you. A broken link in a published article is invisible to you and obvious to your reader.
Renaming and moving are safe, though people avoid both for fear of the opposite. An article's address is built on its number, and the section it sits in is not part of that address at all, so retitling it or filing it elsewhere leaves every existing link working.
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